We’ve had an interesting winter. It started off with a bang, dried out for quite a while, and now we’re getting alternating snow dumps and rain. I skipped the pass again this year and again I wonder if that was the right idea. My plan was to pick out the best days, take vacation, and go skiing, but that hasn’t happened yet.
I have been up three times this year though. I’ve already written about the first trip to Crystal with Tyla and my friend AndyM from work. I’m amazed at how much Tyla has improved from last year without any skiing. What’s her secret? Every day we go out she progresses dramatically. Maybe we should have both gotten passes and set ourselves up to ski once a week.
The second trip was also to Crystal with Tyla but this time it was with AndyD and StephanieW. Aside from an unadvised attempt to lead them down Green Valley bowl, we had a great time.
Then last week I headed up for night skiing at Alpental with AndyM. We started off in a bit of misty rain, but that ended and the slightly warm snow was soft and very nice. It started to turn into frozen lumps by the end of the night but we were done anyway.
I don’t know that I’ll ever get another 29 day ski season (at least until I retire), but these trips up with friends are a lot of fun!
Every October, Microsoft has a big auction for charity. Employees can put things up for other employees to bid on. Four years ago, I won a day of semi-professional ski photography. 
We have a row of arbor vitae trees in the backyard. They provide a nice visual block between us and the neighbors, but during the recent snow storm, they took quite a beating. The tops of the trees were bent down so far that I could hit them with a broom!
Very shortly after buying the projector, I built a simple shelf mount for it. It was easier and cheaper than hanging it from the ceiling and the Epson 8350 has awesome lens shift so I was still able to get the picture in the right spot. However, the cables were left dangling down the wall. I finally got around to fixing that this past weekend.
As our snowstorm dragged on last week, the pantry started getting thin. Thankfully we’re only a half mile walk from the grocery store, but what fun is that? I decided to invent some dinner. Since they were calling the storm “snowmaggedon”, I decided to call this “snowmaghetti.” The picture is atrocious, but that’s kind of the point. It doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as it tastes good and you can use what you already have in the pantry. So here’s how I made it, but when you make this, you’re required to experiment!
Remodeling
For the last couple years, I’ve been the property guy at church. Normally it’s just small tasks and general upkeep, but late last summer, I started a huge project. The church received a very large anonymous donation designated for remodeling the house that’s on the church property.
In the past, the house has been used as a place for our Pastor’s to live, a place for our teachers to live, and extra space for classes and events. It has been falling in to disrepair and that seems to have accelerated the last couple years since no one was living there.
I gathered a bunch of input from people who had lived there before and other congregation members, got bids from two contractors, and finally signed a contract. There’s way too much to cover here, but this is a small subset of the improvements we made:
I was responsible for drawing up the basic plans and work item list, but from that point I handed over the reigns. Our general contractor was Jim Lawrence of Lawrence Construction Company and I highly recommend him. We’ll hopefully be giving him a call in the future for some work on our house. He finished the project quickly and did a lot of the interior design himself which removed a lot of decisions from my plate.
It would be much better if we had more “before” pictures, but here’s comparison of the old kitchen and the old kitchen to give you a little taste of the scope of this project.